Administrative

Martin Beech has written a superb summary of Alpha Centauri studies for the Royal Astronomical Society’s journal Astronomy and Geophysics, covering recent work up to and including the discovery of planet candidate Centauri B b. A fine holiday gift! I had been hoping to write it up this morning, but Christmas events, not least of […]

Last week I reported on information from a source on the WISE mission that no new red dwarfs had yet been discovered out to a distance of 10 light years. This past weekend I received an email from my source apologizing for mis-typing. He had meant to say no brown dwarfs — not red dwarfs […]

Best holiday wishes to all from Centauri Dreams. I’m now going on an abbreviated schedule, with no post today or on Monday. I’ll follow the same pattern next week as we close in on the New Year. The next regular post, then, will appear Tuesday December 27, and we’ll see what interesting news items accumulate […]

It hasn’t escaped my attention that in the past seven years, I’ve taken no more than a couple of days off at a time from writing Centauri Dreams posts. Now that the doldrums of summer are here in the northern hemisphere, it seems a good time to take a somewhat longer break. Not that I’ll […]

Update: As of 1611 UTC, the IKAROS blog is reporting “IKAROS state has been confirmed to be good.” More images and data are in the works, but we’re not likely to see anything until tomorrow. It’s getting late in Japan (2306 JST as I write, or 1406 UTC), and although a JAXA tweet promised new […]

And I thought I was going to more or less take the weekend off, maybe finishing up a second reading of Rare Earth and enjoying some of the delightful spring weather that has taken hold around here. So much for that. Server issues caused this site to be transferred to a new server, which subsequently […]

Several interesting items in the news today but I won’t be able to get to them, try as I might. I’m just coming off surgery yesterday (minor), and although I’m otherwise fine, the pain medication I’m taking makes me so groggy that I hesitate to post. So bear with me until tomorrow, when I should […]

Best wishes to all for a wonderful 2008, and thanks beyond the telling to the numerous readers who participated in our discussions in the year past. There will be no post on New Year’s day, but we’ll get back to the normal schedule on the afternoon of January 2. Have a wonderful holiday.

Merry Christmas! And for those who celebrate other holidays — or none at all — best wishes for the season. Centauri Dreams will not publish on December 25. Normal publication resumes on the afternoon of the 26th.

Charter

In Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster looks at peer-reviewed research on deep space exploration, with an eye toward interstellar possibilities. For the last nine years, this site has coordinated its efforts with the Tau Zero Foundation, and now serves as the Foundation's news forum. In the logo above, the leftmost star is Alpha Centauri, a triple system closer than any other star, and a primary target for early interstellar probes. To its right is Beta Centauri (not a part of the Alpha Centauri system), with Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon Crucis, stars in the Southern Cross, visible at the far right (image: Marco Lorenzi).

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